Women’s Strength in Technology Is Greater Than It Seems

On my way back from New York recently, I met a young woman whose point of view compelled me to question my own. I’d stopped at the airport bookstore to pick up some in-flight reading. In the check-out line, a young lady had several books on programming. I asked her if they were all for her and she said yes. She was a software developer and enjoyed reading about the new trends in her field. I’ve often rued the woeful shortage of women in tech and told her how delighted I always was to see a young woman embrace technology. “There just aren’t enough of you,” I said. “That’s not completely true,” she said, “Everyone seems to be searching for quantity and they miss the quality right under their noses.”

She is certainly right. While the number of women in the technical fields may be low, the impact that they are making is markedly higher. It’s only fair that we continue to highlight the disproportionate contribution that women are making in our industry.

This issue has been dissected into many different parts. An analysis by Laurien Vega at the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, notes that the issue can be divided by recruitment, retention, gender biases, stereotypes, threat, attrition, even biology.

However, it is refreshing to focus instead on the success stories of the past few years. The big names are well documented – new Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer, IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Facebook COO and now board member Sheryl Sandberg, or even Robin Abrams who, having led several tech companies such as VeriFone and ZiLOG, is now making invaluable contribution as a director in our company. Surely, they have made a significant contribution in the technology industry, and we are all aware of these iconic women.

Several others may not be leaders in the conventional sense, but have led trail blazing developments in technology. Here are a few amazing women worth noting.

We often take Flash video animation as a given on our computers today, but few of us know that Sarah Allen led the team that developed this now seemingly omnipresent technology.

A software engineer par excellence and a serial innovator, Allen has a history of developing great products. In an interview with the National Center for Women in Information Technology, Sarah dismisses the stereotypical technical mind-block attributed to women, stating simply: “I didn’t see a big division between technical things and non-technical things.” She thought the Apple II her mother brought home was “just a toy” and taught herself the computer language Basic through a manual that came with the computer. She was 12 years old at the time.

While uploading a presentation on SlideShare, we are reminded of the fact that CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha played a major role in bringing alive this revolutionary new platform for collaboration. Rashmi left a doctoral program in cognitive neuropsychology to become a technical entrepreneur. The result–SlideShare–many people now refer to as the “YouTube of PowerPoint presentations.” Raised in a family of professionals–neither technocrats nor entrepreneurs–she grew up in Kolkata and Allahabad before heading to the U.S. for her doctorate. So how did she turn to technology and entrepreneurship? “I like independence. I like to build things,” she told India Knowledge@Wharton in an interview. And SlideShare allowed her to do both.

Sarah and Rashmi are just the proverbial tip of an iceberg. Dig deeper and you will find that women have a big role to play in building some of the best apps and software we use every day. Women have been instrumental in building the immensely popular News Feed and Photo Viewer at Facebook. The director of engineering at Facebook is Jocelyn Goldfein. She has been a huge part of Facebook’s success.

How many have heard of Chieko Asakawaand her contribution to making the Internet and other web resources available to the visually impaired by automatically converting text and icons to voice?

Thinking about all the achievements of these women, my thoughts went back to the young woman at the bookstore. Her parting words still resonate in my mind as she said: “Stop worrying about how many women there are in technology. Just create a level playing field. The numbers will follow.”

Professor Knut Holtan Sorensen of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), who co-authored the book Technologies of Inclusion: Gender in the Information Society, says “It’s about time that we explore what includes women in the ICT field and stop focusing on what excludes them.”

Would this then be a more effective approach to bringing about a change we have all been seeking? I am riveted with the possibility. What do you think?

The factors that render the electrical grid vulnerable to cyber attack are strikingly similar to the cyber risk issues faced by health care, financial services, and other industries. But one recent malware campaign targeting utilities shows just how exposed the grid remains to cyber threats.